Borrowed Reality
by Without.The.Rain
Summary: AU I didn't know the full story, but my dad had done terrible things. Things that I didn't want my new friends knowing, my first in ten years. Ohio is the first place where nobody knew the truth, but you can't run from your past forever though. Read AN!
1. Chapter 1

**Title: B****orrowed Reality **

**Summary: **

**AU I didn't know the full story, but my dad had done terrible things. Things that I didn't want my new friends knowing, my first in ten years. Ohio is the first place where nobody knew the truth, but you can't run from your past forever though. **

**Everyone has memories of things of things that happened a long time ago, but they're so hideous that you don't dare look directly at them. Like scars that you keep hidden from everyone else but can't quite forget, because you know they will be with you even in your final days.**

**Pairing: ****Puck/MOC, eventually Puck/Dave, Quinn/OC, most canon couples****. **

**Rating: M**

**!WARNINGS!: swearing, violence, death, mentions of physical, sexual, and emotional child abuse, drug abuse, weapons, domestic violence, stalker, slash and sex scenes.**

**Disclaimer: Sorry, I do wish I was RM at times, then I would change Glee in so many ways…**

I've sometimes wondered what I was really born to be, a badass, an outcast, or something more? Most people at school seemed to have no problem figuring out who they were, they never seemed to need to think about it; of _course _they are meant to be a cheerleader, a band geek…a faggot…There was no doubt in their minds, or at least that's what I saw for my first few years of high school.

Even the people that were bullied everyday of their lives, they never appeared as if they wanted to change, that maybe, just _maybe_, being the gay guy wasn't worth the torment, almost as if what they had was the only logical thing to do. I had doubts. I wanted to be happy with whom I was, but at times it felt impossible. Badasses aren't supposed to have doubts, right?

Maybe I'm just one of those people that over thinks everything, has to question why it is what it is and what it _could_ be like. It mostly because of my mom; she's a really deep thinker. My mom, Levina Puckerman, who is also known as The Peacekeeper to everybody on our street and who attends the temple. She is one of the most ethical people on the planet. You would think, given who she is, that I would have grown up to be the most emotionally well-adjusted kid on the block. Of course I didn't; I have my dad to thank for that.

She tried, she really did try to give me the best life considering our circumstances. Mom had lots of long talks with me about how people work and how to read people's emotional states through body language, mostly so I could tell what they thought of me. She didn't want me to be hurt by lies. I found it incredibly difficult though, I just hadn't inherited her talent for reading people. I didn't gain any of her emotional stability ether. I got my emotional state from my father. I got his temper and toughness. Unfortunately, I learned that rage was _very _destructible, but on the other hand, my ability to never _seem_ affected by peoples words paid off.

As I grew up, I became known for being tough, able to take a really hard punch and I even survived numerous bangs to the head and getting flipped over a car, breaking three ribs and cracking my head open again. I was strong. Everybody knew that after my first fight at my new school. It had helped protect me from casual, and mayor childhood accidents. I often wished my strength had extended to my heart and spirit. That way I wouldn't have to feel so much.

Mom did what she could, but I could have been more than seven when I realized everybody had started looking at our family differently. Some looked at my mom with disgust and others with pity. They were harsher on my dad, always sending him spiteful looks and they always looked at me with pity. It was as if they almost _knew_ what was going on behind closed doors…but that was impossible, they was no way they could have known.

I remember people keeping their kids away from me, pulling them away if they came to play with me on the playground. I remember Mom would sometimes bring me home from the park, set me down with some juice, waffles, and a Toy Story movie, and then go into the kitchen to have a hushed argument with my dad before locking herself in her room to cry.

I wasn't old enough to understand what was going on at the time, I was only a kid. I did know that it had something to do with my best friend, Jett, who had drowned in our swimming pool.

Things only escalated from there, at one point, somebody had even thrown a rock through my parent's window before screaming something at them and running off. The same day as Jetts' funereal we left Dallas, Texas, and moved far away to Pittsburgh.

I hated it there and desperately wanted to move back home. Whenever I asked ether of them, dad always got a nervous look on his face and mom suddenly looked sick with guilt. There was obviously something they weren't telling me.

After a year and a half of living there, something happened and dad had vanished, leaving behind my mom, who was devastated and pregnant, and a trail of rumours in his wake.

Just after Enot was born, when I was almost nine, I went to her door and listened. I could hear her crying, so I opened it and asked if she was hurt.

She was sitting on the bed, holding a picture frame in her hands, one I never remembered seeing around the house. I looked at the man in it, a teenager with glasses, longish curly hair and a wide smile. He had his arm around a young woman, my mom.

"Is that daddy?" I asked. Mom started a little, then smiled through her tears and pulled me onto the bed with her. She hugged me to her side, her long dark hair mixing in with mind, forming a little tent. I remembered sometimes I used to try and hide in her hair, and I would always tell her that no monsters could find me in there.

"Yes Noah, that's your dad," she said softly, and wiped her eyes with tissue.

"Did he hurt you again?" I asked, looking at the smiling man. I know now that that question must have cut her to the bone, but kids don't know when they shouldn't ask things. Mom knew that too, but it took her several minutes before she was able to speak.

"Yes, he hurt me. Not on the outside, but on the inside. He made me very sad, baby."

"Did he call you names? That makes me hurt on the inside," I asked. Kids sometimes called me names, like "freak", "monster" or "weirdo."

"No, sweetie, he never did anything like that. It's just…he lied to me. You know how I feel about lying," she explained gently. I knew that lesson, and I knew it well. Mom had never tolerated me lying, not from stealing a cookie out of the jar, saying I washed my hands and I hadn't or when I said somebody else started a fight on the playground. Mom punished me particularly hard when I told a lie, and I have never successfully lied to my mom. Trust me, sitting in the naughty corner is really horrible when you're a little kid.

The fact that he had lied had been enough for me for years.

Because I hadn't bothered to ask anymore, I never fully understood why other peoples parents thought it was okay for their kids to push me around, to alienate me. At first I thought it was because dad had told them about me, told them what I really was and what I had done. It wasn't until I was older and locked on to the real reason that I finally understood. It wasn't what _I _had done, it was what my dad had done to me. What he had done to Jett.

Suddenly everything made sense, but it only made it more painful to deal with. But when I was younger, the taunts, insults, and veiled glances were thick and fast around both of us. If I fought, I knew people would just say I had bad blood, so I couldn't let myself be caught. I had to end fights _quickly_, so I learned how to be strong. I hit the gyms in school, I learned wrestling, kickboxing, Karate and picked up whatever else I could from action films, practicing in the backyard.

My Freshman year of high school had been hell, the bulling had been even more terrifying than I had anticipated. I had came home, during the last term of school and then burst into tears. My mother ushered me in and I had begged and pleaded her to let us move.

In less then twelve weeks, we moved to Ohio, Lima. It had been hard on us, trying to conceal are past and learning to control the impulse I always had to just _talk_ to somebody about it. I was also determined to never have the principal or any teacher call my mom at home for anything, _particularly_ anything involving a fight. I had been forced to fight for the last ten years of my life. I couldn't bare to let it carry on.

For the remainder of freshman year I buried myself in schoolwork and got an after school job at an Italian restaurant, preparing food to bring in a little extra money. I worked under the table until I could legally be employed there, but the owners didn't mind the extra help, no matter my age. I didn't get involved with bad crowds. Or good crowds. Or any crowds, to tell the truth. And I hadn't been in a fight on school grounds as a part of my promise to myself. It was lonely, hellishly lonely, and if I hadn't been so angry at the world for dealing such a bad hand, I might have been severely depressed.

During the first month of my sophomore year, I noticed a shift in popularity. All of a sudden the quarterback was singing on stage, performing 'push it' with Hummel and a crazy chick called Rachel and getting slushied. I hated Finn on sight. He was popular, an idiot and he obviously thought he was pretty damn special, with his group of friends trailing around him and that crazy chick practically hanging all over him. He instantly reminded me of one of the worse bullies I had ever dealt, Eric Johnson.

Two months into our sophomore year was all it took for us to come to blows.

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><p>I hope you read the warnings and please tell me what you thought :)<p> 


	2. Chapter 2

**Title: B****orrowed Reality **

**Summary: **

****AU I didn't know the full story, but my dad had done terrible things. Things that I didn't want my new friends knowing, my first in ten years. Ohio is the first place where nobody knew the truth, but you can't run from your past forever though. ****

**Everyone has memories of things of things that happened a long time ago, but they're so hideous that you don't dare look directly at them. Like scars that you keep hidden from everyone else but can't quite forget, because you know they will be with you even in your final days.**

**Pairings: Puck/MOC, eventually Puck/Dave, Quinn/OC, then canon couples.**

**Rating: M**

**!WARNINGS!: swearing, violence, death, mentions of physical, sexual, and emotional child abuse, drug abuse, weapons, domestic violence, stalker, slash and sex scenes.**

**Disclaimer: Sorry, I do wish I was RM at times, then I would change Glee in so many ways…**

**Chapter two**

There were two guys in the school who had tried to get me onto their side since I first arrived, freshman year. Karofsky and Azimio, the school bullies. I was more interested in keeping my head down and out of sight then bulling helpless kids that were younger than I was, though. I had gotten a few punches and slushie for my troubles, but as I grew taller and bulked up more, they couldn't physically intimidate me anymore, so they went mostly to ignoring me. Or so I thought.

I had been pulling books out of my locker, listening to my MP3 and concentrating hard on keeping people away. Girls seemed to like me now, for some strange reason and I had to try extra hard not to encourage anyone. There was nobody at McKinley I wanted to know at the time, let alone a group of twelve musically talented outcasts.

I turned around to leave for the bleachers when I was smacked in the face with a freezing cold drink, a slushie, I realized as my eyes began stinging.

Growling, I glared at Finn Hudson, who was pushing himself up and trying to apologise. "Sorry," he said sheepishly, looking nervous as he wiped his hands on his jeans. Some little part of my brain was trying to point out it probably wasn't his fault. Finn wasn't the type of person to bully people, really, and I knew how clumsy he was. _Everybody_ knew. He had probably just tripped over his shoelace or something, or slid on a wet spot. Karofsky and Azimio were there, and if I had taken a second to cool down, I would have realized that _they _had probably tripped him. But the other part of my mind, the much larger part, was on fire with anger. He looked just like the kinds of peppy jerks that used to be on my case when I was younger.

"You think you can do what ever you want, just because you're the quarterback?" I demanded, rage building in my mind.

He frowned at me, then held his hands up in a peaceful gesture, "Hey, come on, lets not do this," He started to say. A red mist began to fog my vision at that point. He was just trying to handle me, assuming he could be all cute and morally superior just because of who he was. Two years of suppressing my anger towards guys like him had taken their toll, and I was dancing on a very thin edge of control.

"Why not?" I asked, stepping closer to him, only for him to take an attentive step back. "I think it's 'bout time somebody taught you a lesson. That you just can't walk all over people," I hissed, with deadly menace in my voice.

"Look, dude, calm down! That slushie wasn't even meant for you, it was meant for Kurt! And that was only 'cause-" I cut him off by grabbing the front of his shirt as fifteen years of frustration came to a head in a single sentence. I didn't understand why it was okay to bully somebody just because of their sexual orientation. So what if Kurt was gay? Sex was sex and love was love, and as far as I was concerned, as long as it wasn't rape, nobody should have the right to interfere with it.

"You're so fucking dead, Hudson," I snarled. Finn looked startled and afraid before his face flashed with pain as I hit him squeeze in the mouth, splitting his lip. Then the crowd erupted into cheers of 'Fight! Fight! Fight!" Somewhere inside me was a little startled myself. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do to him, but now he was the focus of everything that was wrong in my world, and all I wanted to do was strike back.

I began to throw more punches as he ducked and dodged, making a few solid hits to my stomach and chest. They were everything I had expected them to be, Finn was a big guy, so I hadn't expected a week strike.

I missed him as I aimed for his head and hit the wall instead, I ignored the sudden spike of pain in my hand and pulled it away to see the I had chipped the wall. Students started scattering as we became more violent. Finn managed to hurl me onto the floor and as he charged for me, I kicked him in his gut, hard. He was momentarily winded and I quickly stood back up.

We both stood there, struggling to catch our breaths and it briefly crossed my mind that nobody had bothered to get a teacher. Finn caught eyes with me and straightened up, then offered me his hand, "Truce?" he asked.

"No fucking way," I hissed, making him instantly pale as he turned and ran towards the teachers lounge. He didn't make it though, he was tripped over by Azimio, who wanted to 'help,' of course. Then I knew who had tripped Finn in the first place. At that point, I didn't even care.

Finn took a header to the floor, squirming around to look at me. He looked terrified, and I had a sudden mental image from his point of view. I must have looked like a demon. Dressed in black, my eyes probably red from the sting of the slushie…_I'm everything they said I would be_. Sick rage flared again as I pounced on him, not relenting as I pounded his face in, staining my hands with blood.

Somebody then peeled me off him, and I caught a brief sight of Mike before I elbowed him in the gut. As I charged for Finn again, I was met with a powerful punch to the face, knocking me over. I banged my head as I fell, and was striked with a sudden wave of dizziness.

It took me a few seconds to recover and I blessed the fact I had become so resistant to pain. It didn't make it hurt any less though. He was facing away from me when I pulled myself up and he was yelling at Karofsky and Azimio, with that crazy chick, Rachel and Hummel at his side. Rachel looked up at Finn with pure worship in her eyes, while Kurt was looking at me, confused. I ignored his stares.

"Hudson!" I yelled, the crowd screamed and cleared out from around me. I felt something in my chest twist in pain, but shoved it aside. Finn tentatively put up his dukes, like he was in a boxing match. I lunged for him, ducked the first punch and then Finn landed the second in the middle of my chest, just out of pure luck. He sure didn't know how to fight very well, but he was more than strong enough to make up for it; it felt like getting hit with a train.

He hit me in the stomach next, harder than before and this time winding me. He then shoved me hard and I staggered back from the push, only to lose my balance and stumble back even further.

He smirked, which only made me angrier. My whole body felt like it was on fire with rage, and at the time I was willing to burn the whole world. I sprinted towards him, only to see with dismay that one of his friends had tossed him a fire extinguisher. If I could get him just before he triggered it, I could get him, I knew it. I ran as fast as I could and launched myself at him…only to be sprayed with the entire contents of the can as Finn stopped me cold.

I rolled over and was going to push myself up to keep fighting, but came face-to-toe with Sue Sylvester trainers. Mentally I swallowed, because I knew that she was going to have to call my mom. And now I had broken a promise I had made to myself to never have that happen, to never cause her any more worry.

If the cheerleading couch hadn't been there I would have slugged Finn.

Mom had been there when I got home, which was unusual, as she worked night shifts. The fact she hadn't gone to work because of me only made my guilt more powerful. We were already struggling to pay the bills.

I would have left my car at school, giving me more time to calm down and make my thoughts more coherent, but I was sure somebody would sabotage it, messing with the breaks or something. So instead, I ended up dropping in at work. It was one of the few places where people besides family were happy to see me, or at least acted like I was in the room.

When I got there I almost begged Sabazio, the owner of the restaurant, to let me work, even though Wednesday was my day off. I was avoiding going home; I didn't want to face that shame, or the look of disappointment on my moms face.

I had been working for Sabazio since I was fourteen. My birthday was in the middle of June, meaning I was one of the youngest in my year. I was unofficially doing work until I could get a permit, but still spending five or seven hours a night shifting between being a busboy and cooking, normally working six nights a week. On the weekends I did full shifts to boot, trying to get enough money to help out with the bills and make sure I never had to ask mom for anything. It wasn't as if I had anywhere else to be on the weekends, was it?

I wouldn't have to do it much longer, Mom said things were looking brighter for her. Now that nobody saw her as a disgrace, or saying she obviously hadn't done her job very well, or even trying to avoid her like the plague. Mr. and Mrs. Gallo and there sixteen year old daughter, Anna, had become really good friends in the last few months. I had even picked up a pretty fair amount of the language, mostly because Mrs. Gallo forgot to switch to English when she was mad or in a hurry. Anna was fluent in Spanish, and pretty good at French too, so she tried to teach me. I caught on quickly with Spanish, but French had been hard for me. Anna would always laugh, saying that French was meant to be easier to learn because it was similar to English. I just shrugged. I had never been normal.

The place was usually busy; cheap prices and a good location ensured that I was rarely bored, and the tips weren't horrible. The fact it was normally packed helped distracted me from darker thoughts, from over-analysing things, stopped me from feeling so damn lonely all the time. It was getting on, pushing on ten o'clock, and there was only one customer left. Anna was folding napkins, Mr. Gallo was counting the drawer and Mrs Gallo was cleaning the kitchen, so I wandered over with a water pitcher to see I could help get her out sooner. We couldn't leave until the last customer had left.

"Still working on that?" I asked as I walked up behind her, doing a double take as I realized it was the brown haired crazy chick, the one with the killer voice who was practically eye-fucking Hudson.

"Hey," she said, smiling a little. The fact she hadn't instantly started blabbing away about whatever sprang to mind lead me to two conclusions. One, she was scared of me, or two, she was upset.

"Hey," I replied, still a bit startled. I hadn't seen anybody from school here before.

"You're Puck, right?" She asked, then said, "we go to school together." She was trying to see if I even recognized her.

"Yeah, you're Hudson's friend…" I pointed out, suddenly feeling awkward and praying she didn't start on me about the fight.

"Yeah…" she said, looking…chagrined. What was that about?

"Yeah…" I replied, feeling a little embarrassed. The first time I interacted with her was the fight in the hall, and I felt even more embarrassed about how I had lost my temper in front of a woman. She looked utterly harmless, and obviously didn't deserve to witness that type of violence. She was even eating an entire vegetarian dish…"Want me to stick that in the microwave?"

She hesitated for a moment, glancing at the door longingly for a second before looking up at me, seeming worried and almost like she was begging me. I instantly wished Mr. or Mrs. Gallo would call me over for something…

"Uh…Finn and I had arranged to meet here, but…" I raised an eyebrow. She had been doing everything but throwing herself at him the few times I had seen them together, and he had stood her up on a date? Either he was being cruel, which seemed unlikely, or he was being dense about it. Then again, most fifteen and sixteen year old that didn't have my mom's kind of expert advise generally were clueless. I knew about that crap kind of way long before my classmates. One of the major things my mom never wanted me to have was a broken heart. Not that I could blame her.

"Would you like to sit down?" She asked, pleading me with her eyes. I looked around; the place was empty apart from staff.

"I guess I can…" I said before sliding into the booth opposite her. I pulled out my lighter and a tongue of flame flicked out and lit the candle. It wasn't meant as a romantic gesture, I just liked fire. If she needed to babble on about something for a while, at least I could amuse myself by watching the flame. Lord, I was glad I did after only five minutes in. I spent over twenty minutes sat there and was handed the entire history of one Rachel Berry, before she began gushing about Finn, in even more detail.

Rachel was winding down a bit, going on about a project for Glee, ending up with her gibbering on about when Finn had taken her bowling.

"So, falling for him, was that before or after the bowling ally?" I asked casually, resting my elbows on the table and trying to get comfortable. Rachel contrived to look incredulous, but I could tell there wasn't anything behind it.

"What?" she gushed, giving a fake, half laugh, "I'm not in love with Finn Hudson." All I had to do was give her a _look_ and her tune changed, "Is it that obvious?" she asked me meekly, her shoulders sagging a little.

"Yeah," I nodded, looking resigned.

"Great," she half-squeaked, looking pained.

"So why don't you just tell him?" I asked. My brain was laughing at me, pointing out that here I was, a guy who had always repressed his emotions, telling a girl to let her feelings be known. I told my brain to shut up, pointing out that I didn't _always_ have to be the tough guy. Besides, it wasn't at school; there was no one else watching us. What happens at work stays at work, right? I sure hoped so.

"Well," she looked uncomfortable again, "I was going to ask him to homecoming, but he likes somebody else, and she asked him first. I can't blame him for saying yes, even if I am more musically talented, she is beautiful, and…, well, Quinn is perfect…"

I snorted at that, not because I didn't think Quinn was beautiful, because she obviously was, but the fact Hudson had chosen a bitch like her over Rachel. "Yeah…well you know what I think?" she looked up from her food to stare at me then, "If Finn's stupid enough to let you slip through his fingers, then he doesn't deserve to have you." I had to filter my words a little, I was going to comment on losing a pair of legs like hers, but I thought she might have been a bit creeped out by that. We still weren't friends or anything.

She flushed as I said that, her eyes darted back down to the table before slowly meeting mine again. She then smiled at me weakly and I smirked back, "Thanks," she said, "but I still can't understand how Finn could say yes, Quinn _is_ pretty, but she is a bit of a…"

"Bitch?" I supplied, making her blush again as I cursed.

I rolled my eyes at her, but she nodded anyway before carrying on. "I thought he felt something for me…We kissed in the automation and he took me out on that date, kissed me there too…we had a connection, one I thought went past a normal high school romance…one that could survive anything…or so I thought…"

"Rachel," I began confidently, and then let a bit of a smile creep into my tone, knowing she would blush again, "most guys follow orders from their dicks, not their actual brains. I'm sure there's a lot of guys who like to bone you."

I was right, she went beet red, but still smiled and laugh a little. Mrs. Gallo then called me from the kitchen, yelling at me in Italian to stop socializing and get back to scrubbing tables.

"Just a minute," I called back in Italian too. Out of all of the Gallo's family, Mrs. Gallo's English was the worst. I had tried helping her with it, but she would always get frustrated because she couldn't do it, then order me to get back to work. I switched back to English. "I gotta go," I said with a shrug. "See you around." With that, I got up, and quickly ended up in a long argument with Mrs. Gallo about my work ethic.

It was almost twelve when I got home, taking the long way home, meaning I had plenty of time to think about the fight as my only distraction was a few traffic lights. Each step I took from my car to the house was putting my stomach in a knot. "It's the curse of the Puckerman family bloodline," my mom had once told me. "We tend to feel more, to think about why we feel what we feel, to know what others are feeling. We just feel things very deeply, us Puckerman's. Sometimes too deeply." Damn, she was right.

Now Mom already knew what I had done. The sorry excuse for a Principal had told her, and told her whom it was with, and even sent her the video from the hall, so she could see for herself. So now she would have seen that Hudson had been tripped by a bully and me going psychotic. I would have rather stuck needles in my eyes, stepped in front of a bus, _and_ have a five-course dinner with my dad than face my mom with a guilty conscience.

She was standing in the living room when I got in, her arms outstretched to me, and an expression too complicated to decipher on her face. All of a sudden, I was five years old again, wanting her to hold me tight and protect me from the monsters in the world. This time the monster was me. I lost it entirely, flinging myself into her arms and started crying. She hugged me tightly and pulled me to the sofa, and I wished she could drape her hair over my head like she used to when I was little and upset.

If anybody asked, which I knew wouldn't happen, I would have told them I went to work to let her cool down, but truth be told, it was so _I_ could get my emotions under control. I didn't want to go home mad, I didn't want mom to see that in person. It hadn't worked though, obviously. It was the first time I had cried since I was eleven and hit by a car. This time it wasn't because my head hurt, or my ribs, it was because my heart was aching.

I remember thinking what the other kids at school would have though if they could have seen me right then, big bad Noah Puckerman, crying in his mommy's arms. Then again, none of them had almost tried to kill somebody today, had they? They may not have realized it, but killing him was the only thought occupying my mind at the time. It was as if he was the source of everything that had gone wrong him my life, Jett, my dad leaving, the bullies. In between sobs, I told her the whole story, how it had been all my fault, how angry I had gotten, how it had only been an accident.

I didn't know how long it was, but it was almost an hour later my Mom started talking to me. "He reminded you of those bullies," she said, making it a statement. If I said anything, I think I was going to break down again, so I just nodded. "I know you've been bottling all that up inside, Noah. For years and years I've watched you just bury all of it inside of you, pushing it down and putting it away. You're tried to deal with what your father did with fights with those horrible bullies." Here I felt a flush of shame. She knew about my clandestine fights off school grounds when I was younger. Why did I even bother trying to hide anything from her?

"But you've never let your feelings just _go_ before. And I should have done something about that, Noah. I should have helped you long ago, instead of hiding behind my own fears. I didn't want to try and counsel you about it…I was scared that I would only end up hurting you more. But the damage is worse now _because_ I didn't help. That's what got me in trouble with your father. I was too scared to act; I didn't want to do anything for fear of doing the wrong thing and offending him. I can't do that anymore. I know that you think you're becoming a menace, that you tried to kill Finn, but you are also _so _full of remorse, disgust, and grief for that. You _know_ it's wrong, you know it deep in your bones. You had a terrible scare today, you know what can happen when your temper gets out of control. Noah, the worst has already happened, and the only things that got hurt was a wall and your face."

I slowly raised my head and pulled back to look at her. I had never heard her talk so…assertively before. I had often thought of my mom as a kind of weeping flower, she even talked like she was on knife-edge of tears most of the time. But now she sounded so certain of herself and what she was saying, and it made me want to believe her too. It didn't her to know she was right. But as I raised my head, I had to take a double take. I hadn't paid any attention to what Mom was wearing when I came in, but now I noticed, and it startled me. She was wearing a navy blue pencil skirt and a light blue blouse, her hair was tied up in a neat, professional looking pony tail, which was a first, as I had never seen mom put her hair up before.

"Mom?" I asked tentatively, and she smiled softly.

"Noah, it's time I stopped letting people make me pay for the mistakes I've made. I lost a lot of credibility when the truth about Jeffery came out, everybody thought I was ether incompetent at my job, or harbouring a monster in my home. I let people force me out of a job I loved and did well because I thought I deserved it." She paused for a second to take a deep breath, and her smile brightened. "I had an interview this morning, Noah."

"What?" I asked in shock, I hadn't heard anything about that. "Why didn't you say anything? How did it-" She cut me off by holding up her hand.

"I still wasn't sure if I was ready to start working again, but you're just shown me, rather forcefully, why I used to do what I did, and why I liked it. I helped people so they didn't have to fight, or only fight what really _needs _to be fought for. I helped people with their feelings, so they didn't have the repressed rage or shame boiling inside, waiting to go off at any moment." I froze for a moment, not really sure what was going on consciously, but hoping against hope that my instincts were right.

"I want to help you, Noah. I want to help you, because I know right now that you're so sickly afraid that if _anything_ happens between you and Finn again, you're worried you're going to react with a killing stroke before your brain can yell you no," she said calmly, her arms still around me. My guts turned to at those words, because she had just said aloud things that I could barely articulate, but could still feel, and strongly at that. "You picked a fight with a kid that represented the bullies you've dealt with for nearly ten years, and you couldn't finish it. Not only did the kids at your school run screaming from you, but Finn _humiliated _you in front of everyone."

I had to purposely slow my breathing, as I could feel that sick rage boiling up in me again, heating my skin with anger. I _had_ been humiliating, and if anyone had dared to laugh after Finn had sprayed me with the fire extinguisher, I may have gone ballistic. Mom touched my hand and I suddenly felt the rage begin to subside. She put a gentle but instant hand under my chin and turned my head to look her in the eyes.

"I've told you how it works. It won't change who you are; it doesn't change your personality. It gives you more control over how you react, makes you think more positively and makes it easier to figure out whats going on before you lash out at someone. It makes it so you're in control of you, instead of your rage in control. You might not even notice any difference, except…things that might have made you annoyed don't even bother you, things that would make you angry only make you annoyed, and things that would have you in a killing rage only make you angry."

Mom had met and helped hundreds, maybe thousands of people, to see that they didn't have to be upset or angry all the time. Why should it be so different if she wanted to help me? I would have to open up to her completely, not keeping anything hidden, not one secret… fully honest with my emotions and feelings…it was something I had never even thought of before.

"If I can help, if you want me to, then I will have the confidence to get back to work. I don't care if it's little things at first; I'm not going to let that stop me." She said softly, pleading with her eyes. I sucked in a sharp breath. I had wanted my mom to go back to working as a consular for years, but I had never any idea of what to say to convince her to do so. She had _loved_ that job and had been great at it. I nodded finally, and Mom clasped both my hands.

"Let me tell you a bit about Finn," Mom said, and I blinked at the sudden change of subject. "I only know a little about him, I've met his mother and spoken to him on a few occasions. From what I've seen, Finn is most likely an ethical and reasonable kid. He's _not_ a bully, and now he knows how sensitive you are about bullies, and he may have picked up about that other kid…Kurt Hummel?" I nodded, confirming the name and encouraging her to go on. "I can guarantee he won't do anything like that again. A real bully would probably ride you about it until you did something unforgivable to him," she pointed out.

"I'm not saying you have to be friends with Finn, but that he won't make himself your enemy unless you give him many reason to. He is a cheerful person, and it would take a lot to hurt him, physically and emotionally." I snorted at that as Mom gently took her hands away from mine. I took another deep breath, closed my eyes and ran the fight over in my mind. It was if I could actually see what I was doing, instead of just feeling it. It made me mad, but I no longer felt like marching over to Hudson's house and setting it on fire.

I opened my eyes again and saw my mom smiling at me. I started to smile back, feeling like I had won a prize of some kind. "Hey Mom, you're gonna give 'em hell at the office, you know that?" I told her. We both managed to be serious for about another two heartbeats, but then we started laughing together until we cried.


End file.
